Inventions of love

There are two main charges to defend when it comes to writing novels whose characters are real historical figures. The first is an artistic one: poverty of imagination. Or, can't you think up your own characters, then? The second charge is moral: that messing around with dead people's lives in fiction is deeply unethical.

The first charge can only be defended by the work itself and its imaginative sympathy with the characters, by the quality of the writing, the handling of narrative pace, the artistic validity. The second charge of immorality requires a more robust defence.

In the case of my own novel, Coco and Igor, I first got the idea when I read a 1989 biography of Coco Chanel and learned of her affair with Igor Stravinsky. I was intrigued. What was the queen of couture doing with the high priest of modernist music? I did some research. I learned that Chanel had attended the first performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in Paris in 1913, a concert that ended in riots and is remembered as the big bang of modernism. She was there by accident, invited at the last minute by her dance teacher. Coincidence? Obviously.

Then I learned that the two of them had enjoyed a brief affair in 1920 in Paris. Born an impoverished orphan, Chanel had made her fortune during the Great War. All the other male designers had been co-opted into the war effort, and she was able to corner the market. Stravinsky, meanwhile, had lost everything in the Russian Revolution of 1917. The penniless Igor was happy to accept an invitation to live with Chanel - along with his consumptive wife and four children. For Chanel, having the celebrated composer installed in her villa, while she sponsored his performances, was a social coup. And it was at that precise time, too, that she discovered her revolutionary new perfume, No 5. Coincidence? Probably.

The relationship didn't last long, just a few months, from the summer to the winter of 1920; during that time, Stravinsky made the second of his great stylistic transitions, from noisy modernism to neo-classicism in the ballet Pulcinella. How many of us would have suspected that the 20th century's greatest composer was so intimately involved with the century's greatest couturiére and perfumer? The idea of music and perfume embodied in two figures, and mixing like this, generated a heady brew in my brain. Moreover, there was colour: black and white. Chanel's dresses were famous for their monochrome simplicity, while the black and white keys of the piano keyboard offered a neat visual parallel. I researched further and discovered that they both lived intriguingly parallel lives. Both had known Picasso, Charles Chaplin, John F Kennedy. Born within a year of each other, they both died in the same year, 1971, at the age of 88. Coincidence? Or destiny?

The need to address this question triggered the writing of the novel. But how defend fictionalising real people's lives? Well, until now, their affair has been little known or documented. While biographers acknowledge that the relationship took place, followers of music and fashion still do not generally associate them together. I wanted not to expose them as such, but to explore their extraordinary relationship, and to reveal the fascinating details of their parallel lives. There is a beautiful symmetry to their existences, which I wanted not only to exploit but to share.

Finding patterns is something the human mind delights in. Fiction is a way of trying to make sense of a complex world, of trying to marshal the facts of people's lives and make them yield meaning. It is an attempt to rescue significance from a mass of details and biographical data. We all have a human weakness for colour and rhythm, story and spectacle. Fiction seeks to develop these feelings. This is not unethical, so long as the basic integrity of real characters' lives is maintained.

I would always defend the fictionalising of people's lives, so long as they have been dead for some time, a generation, perhaps; so long as there are no gross distortions of their characters; so long as their lives illuminate a theme, and the attempt is not merely to dig up dirt but to reveal the hidden quickness of things.

Isn't that what John Banville and Peter Ackroyd have done so successfully? Isn't that what the Bible, ultimately, is about? Isn't that why we still appreciate portrait paintings in the age of the camera - because we want lives interpreted, not just recorded? And while some Hollywood biopics can sensationalise a life - one thinks of Irving Stone's caricature of Van Gogh in Lust for Life - others, such as Clint Eastwood's Bird, Peter Shaffer's Amadeus and the Canadian-produced Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, can be both thought-provoking and deeply affecting. Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List proved problematic both artistically and morally, but few would claim that the film was immoral as a project in itself.

Lives are always worth examining, re-inventing and playing with for the insights they yield. The way, for instance, that Chanel liberated Stravinsky sexually and the way he liberated her socially and culturally. The way that their relationship endures as a luminous trace across the 20th century. Only a work of the imagination can express these facets.

As for whether such a venture is moral or immoral, I think we should follow Oscar Wilde in asking more importantly whether, artistically, a book is good or bad, whether or not it illuminates and entertains. And that, happily, is a judgment that readers must make for themselves.